Top 10 Recycling and Environment Stories of the Week (Dec.21-27)

Pacebutler Top 10: Our choices for the Top 10 recycling and environment stories Dec 21-27 submitted at Green Options.

What to do with your post holiday waste. Photo: Inhabitat

Wondering what to do with all the garbage generated during the holidays? A year after the TVA disaster in Tennessee, are coal ash sites now regulated? Why did the world leaders fail to deliver a binding treaty in Copenhagen? Our choices for the Top 10 environment and recycling stories of the week (Dec. 21-27, 2009) cover these topics and more. These stories have also been submitted to Green Options Environment, our social content-sharing site.

Want to know what to do with your post-holiday waste – the crumpled wads of giftwrap, the withering tree, that sweater from Aunt Mabel that was so fugly that it made a baby cry…? Don’t worry, here are our 5 easy tips for what to do with all that stuff after Christmas.

Sad Anniversary: A year ago, a massive coal ash spill took place in Tennessee. About 5.4 million cubic yards of ash ended up in a river and covering the private property of local citizens. The EPA this week called the spill at TVA’s Kingston plant “one of the worst environmental disasters of its kind in history.”

Watch: Water sampling at Emory River and evaluation of clean-up efforts by a team from Appalachian Voices after the December 22, 2008 TVA coal ash disaster in Tennessee

According to TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, only about 2 percent of products that are labeled “eco-friendly” are entirely truthful. The other 98 percent are guilty of greenwashing to some degree. Let’s take a look at some of the worst cases of greenwashing in 2009.

It appears that the white pages – the section of the telephone book that lists residential numbers – may be going the way of the phone booth and rotary dial phone. A growing cadre of consumers and elected officials see the automatic delivery of white pages as unnecessary and wasteful given the availability of free online directories.

A recent opinion piece in The Washington Post urged Americans to “stop going green.” Author Mike Tidwell’s reasoning? We need to stop emphasizing small, voluntary action and instead work toward more large-scale solutions. But are all the things people can do at home that he cites — switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs, properly insulating your house, driving a hybrid car or eating a vegetarian diet — distracting us from making the big-picture changes that we need?

Here’s an opportunity to wisely spend some of the $100 billion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised at Copenhagen to cut the greenhouse gases of developing nations by aiding in the development of renewable energy infrastructure to by-pass fossil fuel dependence.

The machines that could destroy us and our world had, in fact, been invented—a long, long time ago. Almost all of us had been using them almost all the time, from the era of the steam engine and the rise of the British coal economy through the age of railroads and the dawn of petroleum extraction to the birth of the internal-combustion engine and the spread of industrial civilization across the planet.

About 45,000 travelled to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen – the vast majority convinced of the need for a new global agreement on climate change. So why did the summit end without one, just an acknowledgement of a deal struck by five nations, led by the US.

Our country is making a huge mistake in the way we are dealing with global warming. Instead of following the old adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” we are doing the opposite: committing massive dollars for mitigation strategies while at the same time refusing to build the most promising new clean base-load power generation technologies developed by our nation’s top energy scientists.

Beth,
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